The story

Finca La Esperanza is a small 12 hectare farm situated right on the slopes of the Acatenango volcano. With an altitude 1500m above the sea level, an average rainfall of 1300mm and dynamic volcanic soils create perfect conditions for growing spectacular coffees.

In 1950 Don Federico Perez planted first coffee trees in La Esperanza, changing corn crop permanently to coffee. In 1990 the farm was acquired by Hector de la Roca Perez who decided to renovate the farm and plant new varieties like Caturra and Pache.

After passing of Don Hector the farm has been owned and managed by his two grandsons; Erik and German. Their vision for the farm is managing with strong technical, agronomic and financial foundations that leads to positive changes for the environment in which the farm is sustained, that includes workers, natural enviroment and the owners.

It is so encouraging to see two brothers collaborating, working closely together and complementing each other’s skills.

German has been working at ANACAFE as a Q grader for the last 5 years which gave him all the abilities to carry out La Esperanza’s quality control. German’s brother, Erik works in the field managing agricultural side of the farm and its coffee processing.

In 2019 the brothers decided to start a wet milling process on the farm premises which gave them more control and influence to achieve high and consistent quality. Despite limited conditions like no water or electricity access they made it happened.

You can taste all their effort in their coffees that are full of character, elegance and well layered fruity flavors. The coffees that we are able to share with you this year have been processed by using a manual pulper with minimal use of water.

After depulping the coffee is dried on raised beds, cleaned and picked from all cascara particles to assure quality and avoid the risk of overfermentation. All of this is done manually by workers who are specifically assigned to this task.

Coffee is moved regularly to guarantee even drying. At La Esperanza honey method is often use as water acces is limited.

Washed coffees are also depulpedwith the manual pulper and
next, the coffee is wet fermented in barrels from 36-40 hours. After this process coffee is carefully washed in the same barrels and moved to raised beds to finish the process.